Saturday, November 14, 2009

Method 3

In general, I love the idea of cloud computing. I have always been a yahoo user, as opposed to a google user, and was very disappointed when yahoo briefcase disappeared. I became heavily dependent to saving all of my documents in my "briefcase", and so whether I was at work, or school, or home, I could access those documents. It was really important for me in college, so I could work on my homework basically anywhere.

I think there is an acknowledgement when you save your pictures, or your documents, to the cloud that you may not have sole custody of those anymore. For example, facebook photos. The story of the facebook user who found her family photos in advertisements in another country. Only because the user had not selected the correct privacy settings. Is that that REALLY the user's fault?

Cloud computing is almost essential because of its flexibility. To be able to access a favorite recipe that you have saved online, from your phone at the grocery store while you are buying the ingredients is fabulous. As a library, however, you have the have the infrastructure to allow that, like was mentioned in the articles, not lock down the computers so that the users can't access their flash drives. If there is an application out there that is going to help a patron, and we have that knowledge as librarians, then by all means, lets pass it on. I think we can do that in a way that is still cautious, and rewarding.

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